


Flight Path

by Haberdasher



Category: Original Work
Genre: Airplanes, Gen, Small Towns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2019-09-23 23:26:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17089733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher
Summary: The story of a plane and the small town resident who always watched it pass by.





	Flight Path

Life moved like clockwork in the small town of Edgefield, Iowa. Everything was dictated by routines. Every Monday evening, the book club would meet in the church basement, and a dozen grey-haired ladies would join in a discussion that inevitably turned into a heated argument. Every Sunday morning, the whole town would descend upon church dressed in their finest clothes, and Pastor Jameson would give an hour-long sermon, and several of the churchgoers would doze off halfway through. Many town residents set alarm clocks every night and turned them off every morning without them ever going off. The corn was harvested every fall, and every winter a layer of snow would descend upon town, only to slowly but surely melt away every spring as white was replaced with vivid green once more.

And every day, just before two in the afternoon, a plane would fly over Katie Brannigan’s house, and she would stop what she was doing and watch as it passed by.

The plane itself was unremarkable, save for the strangeness of its passing by in the first place. Few other planes passed overhead in Edgefield, and the nearest airport was an hour’s drive away. Katie didn’t know where the plane had come from or where it was heading, only that it made the same flight every day, always passing right over her such that she had to crane her head to watch as it sped by and faded into the distant horizon, leaving Katie with an aching neck and a strange sense of satisfaction.

Katie Brannigan had never been on a plane herself. She only ever left town to visit her nana one town over in Beaver’s Pass or to make the occasional grocery run to nearby Trembleton. Going further than that… well, it just wasn’t part of the routine. She could never justify to herself leaving Edgefield behind and absconding to some distant town for days or weeks at a time, not when there was always so much to be done where she was, when there were so many routines that she simply couldn’t leave behind.

A number of times, just after the plane had left her field of vision, Katie had rushed inside to research flight paths on her old desktop computer, trying to track down the plane that was her daily companion. She wasn’t sure why she was so interested, or what she would do with the information once she had it, but she kept looking into it regardless. Every time, the search turned out fruitless. There were just too many possibilities to narrow down, too many flights to keep track of, and after half a dozen dead ends she always sighed and gave up, listlessly browsing her spam-filled e-mail instead.

But one Saturday in January, Katie’s plane-watching routine was broken.

That Saturday, one of the stray cats that Katie had let into her house fell down and couldn’t get up.

That Saturday, Katie made a frantic phone call to her usual vet, and then to the nearest animal hospital when the vet’s office didn’t answer.

That Saturday, Katie sped down the highway for half an hour until reaching the River City Animal Hospital and spent the rest of the afternoon stuck within its walls, pacing back and forth, until one of the vets solemnly informed her that they were sorry, they had done all they could, but little Smokey was gone.

That Saturday, Katie didn’t see the plane go by.

She arrived back home well after sunset, plopped down in her old armchair that had an imprint of her form sunken into it, and turned on the television. She was there just in time to watch the eight o’clock news, as she always did, the abnormality of the day giving way to routine once more.

The lead story was a plane crash. Flight 504, they said. Denver to Chicago. Almost two hundred people had died that afternoon when their plane had crashed into the ground just after crossing the border into Illinois. The news showed pictures of the deceased, told their stories: the newlywed couple embarking on their honeymoon, the college students returning to school, the mother leaving behind a distraught husband and two-year-old daughter. A handful of the victims were from Iowa, and the newscasters paid special attention to these local casualties as they elaborated upon the details of the tragedy.

None of the victims were from Edgefield, of course. Edgefield residents as a rule were not plane-boarders. But though Katie knew none of the victims, she still stared at the television transfixed, her heart going out to them all as she watched the plane’s remains smoke and burn.

Then they showed the flight path, and Katie’s heart skipped a beat. It had passed not only through Iowa, but through her part of the state, right by her little town- almost as if…

She ran to her computer, pulled up the websites that she had used in her previous vain attempts at research, and confirmed her suspicions. Flight 504 had flown over Edgefield. Had flown right over her house, like so many times before, but this time she hadn’t been there to see it.

And though she looked and looked, after that cold Saturday in January, Katie Brannigan never saw a plane pass over her house again.


End file.
